FILM 1787: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III
TRIVIA: As the production could do nothing about inquisitive crowds watching them while they were filming in Rome, they actually set up a phony second unit a little further away, hired several girls in bikinis and several older women dressed as nuns and pretended to be filming takes for the film, while the main unit got on with their business largely undisturbed.
After the success of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Simon Pegg was asked whether he was going to be pursuing a career in Hollywood, to which he laughed and replied "It's not like I'm going to be in Mission: Impossible III".
With a budget of one hundred fifty million dollars, this is the most expensive movie ever undertaken by a first-time feature film director.
J.J. Abrams' directorial debut on a feature film.
Special Effects Technician Steven Scott Wheatley sued Paramount Pictures, and Tom Cruise's production company for gross negligence, after the pyrotechnics in a stunt in which he was involved, went wrong, and he was engulfed in a ball of flame. Wheatley suffered third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body.
Ethan Hunt makes references to Lake Wanaka. Lake Wanaka is a lake in the South Island of New Zealand, which Tom Cruise visited while in New Zealand filming The Last Samurai(2003). He liked the place so much that he included it in this film.
One of the five percussionists in the orchestra which did the film's score was Emil Richards, who thirty years ago played bongos on the original Mission: Impossible (1966) theme.
To promote the film, Paramount rigged 4,500 randomly selected Los Angeles Times vending boxes with digital audio players which would play the theme song when the door was opened. The audio players did not always stay concealed, however, and in many cases came loose and fell on top of the stack of newspapers in plain view, with the result that they were widely mistaken for bombs. Police bomb squads detonated a number of the vending boxes and even temporarily shut down a veterans' hospital in response to the apparent "threat". Despite these problems, Paramount and The Los Angeles Times opted to leave the audio players in the boxes until two days after the movie's opening.
Tom Cruise and Phillip Seymour Hoffman previously appeared together in Magnolia(1999).
" Mission Impossible Iii "was Tom Cruise's eighth movie in a row to gross over $100m domestically.
DIRECTOR CAMEO: J.J. Abrams: The director can be seen in the hospital when Ethan is looking for his wife. He is also the voice on the phone talking about a free trip to Mexico.
